Demo Fest, now in its fifth year, is a way for the researchers within Microsoft's adCenter Labs to get their ideas and prototypes out to the company's product groups. The adLabs group showed four prototypes to a handful of reporters in Redmond this morning. That's a small sample of the 25 demonstrations and 10 poster presentations it will have for full-time employees to see later today.

The demos I saw were not jaw-dropping. The concepts seemed to echo things we'd seen elsewhere or things I would have thought were already table stakes for advanced online advertising (understanding whether a user is searching for local information, such as a dentist in Seattle, for example).

AdLabs general manager Eric Brill was asked whether other demonstrations pointed more clearly to Microsoft's strategic direction for online advertising.

"According to current planning, it should be late September or early October." That's what Ray Chen, president of a Tapei OEM, Compal Electronics, told Bloomberg about when Microsoft may begin shipping Windows 7. That would put it ahead of Microsoft's officially stated schedule, which has the new OS due by January 2010. But it would match some observers' expectations that Microsoft will have Windows 7 available in time for the 2009 holiday season.

LAS VEGAS -- Amateur singers and song writers, it's time to come out of the shower.

Microsoft has a new tool that automatically generates backup music to go with original melodies and lyrics sung into a computer. Listen to songs created with the software after the jump.

Microsoft Research showed off several interesting projects at the Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles yesterday. I wrote about three of the projects in today's paper: SecondLight; a data center sensor network; and Boku, a visual programming language for kids.

The company also announced a major upgrade to its very cool WorldWide Telescope. And today, the Washington Secretary of State's Digital Archives said it was using a new audio-search technology from Microsoft Research aimed at providing better access to thousands of hours of archived government hearings. Read on for more details.

MICROSOFT

WorldWide Telescope.

LOS ANGELES -- After two days of talking about new products, Microsoft is highlighting its longer-term future today. Rick Rashid, senior vice president of Microsoft Research, opened the company's Professional Developers Conference with a review of the role his organization plays in pushing the state of the art in computer science.

When Tommer Leyvand was a graduate student at Tel-Aviv University, he did some interesting work on software that "enhanc[es] the aesthetic appeal (or the attractiveness) of human faces in frontal photographs (portraits)." Now a part of Microsoft's Xbox 360 XNA team in Redmond, Leyvand's "beautification engine" has attracted attention with a write up in the Skin Deep column of The New York Times.

Microsoft, New York University and several other New York-area schools are launching an initiative to study how video games can be applied to education. The Games For Learning Institute will "focus on evaluating computer games as potential learning tools for science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) subjects at the middle-school years (grades 6-8)."

Authorities identified the hiker who died in the Guye Peak area of the Cascades on Monday as Oded Schramm, a researcher in the theory group of Microsoft Research.

MIT's Technology Review, the world's oldest tech magazine, has named four Microsoft employees to its "annual list of 35 outstanding men and women under the age of 35 who exemplify the spirit of innovation in business and technology." Only Harvard and its affiliates had more people on the TR35.

I didn't have space in today's print story to share an update on Microsoft's translation efforts, which have been in the market -- quietly -- for nearly a year. The Microsoft Translator group is somewhat unique in that it's still part of the Microsoft Research team, even though it's a live product. That's also why it was on display at the Microsoft Research Faculty Summit yesterday.

On Tuesday, Microsoft and Intel, along with researchers from two as-yet unnamed universities, are planning to announce "significant new research ventures," according to a news release Microsoft sent out this afternoon.

The executives making the announcement are Tony Hey, corporate vice president in charge of external research at Microsoft Research, and Andrew Chien, an Intel vice president in charge of the Corporate Technology Group and director of Intel Research.

I wonder if their announcement will look anything like the ongoing research into Internet-scale applications backed by Google and IBM, which got its start at the University of Washington.